The Destructive Culture of Pretty Pink Princesses

Girls the world over often go through a "princess phase,"
enthralled with anything pink and pretty — most especially the Disney
princesses.

When it happened to Peggy Orenstein's daughter Daisy, the
contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine stepped back to examine the
phenomenon. She found that the girlie-girl culture being marketed to little
girls was less innocent than it might seem, and can have negative consequences
for girls'
psychological, social and physical development.

Orenstein's exploration took her to Walt Disney World, the American
Girl flagship store in New York City and a child beauty pageant. She details
her quest in the new book "Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the
Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture" (Harper Collins, Jan. 25).

Orenstein: I'm a
mother, and I think that when you're an adult, you don't really notice what's
going on so much in the world of kids' culture. And then you have a kid, and
suddenly it's kind of shocking how segmented the market is for girls and boys,
and when you're looking at girls' stuff it's just like everything has been
dipped in Pepto-Bismol.

And so I started to go, 'What is this?' You know, girls are
doing so well academically, they're doing so well in leadership, they're doing
so well on the sports field. Maybe all this is no problem and it just means
we're free to indulge this. Or, is it something else? Is it that somehow,
simultaneous to those gains, the pressure on girls to define themselves by
their looks, and define looks in a very narrow way as being sexy and hot, and
that too has been ratcheted up, and lowered down so that it starts, you know,
basically in the womb.

A lot of people were looking at issues of eating
disorders or depression, or sexuality or culture, and issues in teenagers.
But obviously these things don't just burst forth on your 13th birthday. And I
really wanted to see what was going on in the culture of little girls.

You examine a lot of
aspects of girls' culture, but specifically the Disney princesses. What sort of
messages might be getting through to girls though these products?

Orenstein: When
you look through the princess products there's a lot of makeup, there's a lot
of 'my princess wedding,' you know, things that are pretty retrograde on that
level. But while they're not sexualized per se, they're certainly appealing to
what goes kind of hand-in-glove with that, as girls are going to get older,
which is about consumerism and narcissism. And certainly they're encouraging
girls to, you know, think that looking pretty and getting a lot of feedback
from others about what a pretty princess you are is pretty important, and that
having the most stuff is very important.

You talk about a lot
of examples, beyond the princess products, of problematic toys. What are some
others?

Orenstein: My
daughter got a make-your-own messenger bag for her 7th birthday. It was like a
cheap messenger bag kind of thing, and then iron-on transfers to put on it, and
the iron-on transfers were like pink and purple and orange hearts and stars and
flowers and whatever, and your name, and things like that with letters. But
then it said, one of them was 'pampered princess' and one of them was 'spoiled'
and one of them was 'brat.'

And my daughter looked at those and said, 'Mom, why do they
want me to put that on my purse?' And I said, 'Gosh, I don't know.'

And all over the box and all over the instructions it said, 'It's
all about me.' And that is a really powerful message that girls get in these
products: 'It's all about me,' 'It's all about you,' 'Be true, be you,' –
that's the Moxie Girlz slogan.

And so there's this weird way that the ideas that were being
put forth in the girl power slogans of the 1990s, which were about self-actualization
and self-determination, and being valued for what you do and not how you look,
have been distorted so that it's its own opposite, so that girl power means
being valued for how you look instead of what you do. And that being confident
is expressed by being spoiled, pampered, bratty, narcisistic.

So just how bad are
these things?

Orenstein: Some
of these things, like the Disney princesses, and all the princess culture that
it's spawned, seemed innocent, protective, easy, harmless – and maybe it is.
And maybe it's not. But I think that parents need to have more context about
girls' culture to understand the decisions they're making and make them so that
they'll be in concert with their values.

You've said that with
all the pink toys these days, girls are learning that toys that are pink are
meant for them, and toys that are not pink are not meant for them. Is that
really what they think?

Orenstein: I see
that with girls, they do believe that, a lot of them. They won't play with it
if it's not pink.

The Magic 8 Ball is pink, the Yahtzee set where they've
replaced the numbers with hearts, flowers, flip-flops – those things are real.
And I think that the plethora of those, the explosion of those, are not healthy
either for the way that girls
think of femininity, or the way that boys and girls think of each other.

There's an anecdote I share in the book, also about my poor
daughter, she ends up being focused on. But she was going on her scooter with
another little girl when she was 5. And Daisy's helmet was black with flames
shooting across it in green, yellow, orange and red, I think, and she has a
regular silver razor scooter. And her friend had a pink Hello Kitty helmet and
a pink scooter.

And her friend actually looked at it – I mean, I swear,
these kids sometimes just hand me these things – but she looked at Daisy and
said, 'How come your helmet's not pink? It's not a girl's helmet.'

And Daisy looked at it, and she kind of furrowed her brow
for a second, kind of like, 'Oh, what, hmm,' then she said, 'Well, it's for
boys or for girls.'

And the other girl kind of looked at it, and she said, 'Oh,'
and they kept playing.

I thought, so look at that interaction, what went on? Did
Daisy learn that maybe she should stick with the pink and not be questioned? Or
did that other girl learn that maybe there's something out there, maybe the one
measly pink Lego set in the store is not the only thing she could play with?
You know, I don't know.

You also address a
termcalled KGOY – kids getting
older younger – along with the earlier and earlier sexualization of little
girls. What's going on there?

Orenstein: While
girls may be physically developing at a younger age, psychological development
hasn't changed. So girls are playing with toys or wearing clothes or watching
videos or otherwise partaking of a culture that is too mature or sexual for
them, and they're encouraged to sort of play-act at sexy. [Girls
Entering Puberty at Younger Ages, Study]

If you take a look at any girl product line, you're going to
start finding massive amounts of makeup, and you know, the sexy Halloween
costumes and everything for 6-year-olds. So on one hand, it's dress-up, on the
other hand, it's sexualizing in a way that really isn't necessary.

You spoke to
scientists about how this affects girls' development. What did you learn?

Orenstein: What really
floored me, both as a girl-advocate and as a parent, was the way that prematurely sexualizing girls
or play-acting at sexy for them from a young age disconnects them from healthy
authentic sexual feeling. So that they learn that sexuality is something that
you perform, instead of something that you feel.

And that can have implications as they get older in the
culture, both because of that, and because that's increasingly what they're
going to be presented with – the idea that their sexuality is something to
perform for others. And so starting that at the age of 4, 5, or 6 is troubling
for a whole set of reasons that I hadn't anticipated when I started this.

There was one researcher who works on girls' sexual desire
issues and she told me that by the time the girls she talks to are teenagers,
when she asks them how a sexual encounter – and by sexual encounter I don't
mean necessarily intercourse, but anything you would define as a sexual
encounter – how it felt, they respond by telling her how they think they
looked.

That's really troubling. And also completely comprehensible
in the context of how they grow up.

I got really kind of intrigued by the idea of how much of
girls' identity is encouraged to be about performance. Whether it's the
performance of how they look, or the performance of sexiness, or the
performance of femininity.

But there's this performative aspect of identity that starts
really young and in our culture at this moment reaches a sort of apotheosis.
Once they get a little older and they're creating
profiles online and kind of performing their teenage identity as kids
always do anyway, but suddenly doing it in this really public way in front of
322 of their best friends forever, right, and in this kind of disconnected
fashion that we don't know the full implications of, but all of it, for girls
in particular, reinforces this idea that who you are is how you perform, and
who you are is how you look.

Do you see a backlash
against this?

Orenstein: There's
a lot of people right now, I think a groundswell in fact, of parents and advocates
who are saying — 'Enough, this has gone too far, and we want our daughters'
childhoods back, we don't want them sexualized, we don't want them defined this
way, we don't want everything to be about pink and pretty and decoration. We
don't want them, you know, having their whole culture be about the externals,
we don't want to be lied to by role models who wear promise rings when they're
15 and then do pole dances when they're 17. You know, we just want our kids to
be kids and to be able to play off-script.'

'I just think we want a lot for our daughters.' And rightly
so.

'We want them to fulfill their potential, we want them to be
kind and compassionate, we want them to feel that who they are is what they do,
we want them to feel pretty in a whole range of ways and not only in this one
narrowly defined way. We don't want them to feel inadequate if they don't meet
this unattainable standard. We want the standards of beauty to be huge and
broad and wonderful and attainable, and also not the most important thing about
them.'

But those desires are not in sync with the products that
they're playing with, the media that they're watching and absorbing, the
computer games that they're playing, and what the culture is telling them that
they should be. And we need to think about how to put that more in sync.

So are you ever
tempted to just sort of abscond with your family and your daughter and move to
the woods or something like that?

Orenstein: In a
word, yes. My husband talks about that all the time.

But you can't. One of the things in the book … I write in
the end about 'Rapunzel' because I knew that 'Tangled' [a new movie based on
the story 'Rapunzel'] was going to be coming out right around the time the book
was coming out. I thought a lot about 'Rapunzel', and the real lesson about 'Rapunzel'
is about mothers and daughters, and that you can't protect your daughter from
the world by locking her into a tower.

I have to say, I did not anticipate when I decided to have a
baby how much of my job was going to be protecting my child's childhood. And I
think a lot of parents are really conscious of wanting their children to stay
children and not be aged up.

I want my kid to be 3 when she's 3, I want her to be 5 when
she's 5. But I also can't lock her in the tower. So what I really want to do,
and what I hope the lesson of the book is, through my own journey and through
the research that I put in, is how to arm your daughter so that she has the
wherewithal, by the time she's older, to make good decisions for herself.
Because eventually that's what it's going to be about and that's our role as
parents.

Clara has a bachelor's degree in astronomy and physics from Wesleyan University, and a graduate certificate in science writing from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She has written for both Space.com and Live Science.